Free LOVE OF A RODEO MAN (MODERN DAY COWBOYS) by Bobby Hutchinson

the acerbic little vet hired her. She loved the work and th e surroundings. It was the people she worked with that she found unreliable at best, irresponsible at worst. It hadn’t taken her a week to figure out that being Doc Stone’s assistant actually meant assuming almost full responsibility for his busy rural veterinary practice.
    As soon as he’d realized she was fully competent—two days after he’d begrudgingly hired her, it seemed to Sara—the wily old vet had all but disappeared, leaving her to run the entire business nearly alone, while paying her the meager salary of an assistant. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Over the past weeks, she’d begun to suspect that it was a blessing her boss didn’t do more of the actual vet work.
    Doc Stone was making mistakes, serious errors in judgment that troubled Sara.
    The first indication had been a puzzling emergency call Sara made to a ranch that raised feedlot cattle. Doc had visited the ranch the day before and used a relatively new drug while medicating the animals’ feed. Sara was called because several of the animals were unsteady on their feet and had stopped eating. Meticulous checking on Sara’s part revealed that the cattle were suffering from a drug overdose.
    Doc had gotten the new drug dosage wrong—fortunately not enough to kill the animals or leave residue in t he meat. But for several horrible days, Sara wasn’t entirely certain of that. Because she was able to correct the dosage almost immediately, there was no lasting harm done.
    The farmer didn’t ask exactly what the problem had been; he seemed relieved that she was able to correct it and of course Sara didn’t volunteer the fact that Doc had caused it. He was a respected practitioner in the area. She didn’t want to publicly embarrass him.
    But then she’d realized that Doc was using old syringes and needles routinely, a practice guaranteed sooner or later to result in contamination of one animal by another. She’d tried to talk with him about both problems. He’d been angry and defensive.
    “I’ve been a vet in this area longer than you’ve lived, young lady,” he’d snapped, and his totally bald head had seemed to glow with rage. “No female fresh out of college can tell me how to do my job.”
    “But what if...”
    He was much shorter than Sara, but he’d seemed to tower over her as his raspy voice put her in her place. “So I make mistakes. Do you think you never will? Does all this fancy new training they give you insure you’ll never do anything wrong? " He was adept at avoiding issues, at making her feel he’d done her a huge favor by hir ing her at all, which was probably an honest reflection of how he felt.
    He’d made it plain from the beginning he’d pref er a male vet, that he was hiring her only because he felt grateful for things Dave Hoffman, her stepfather, had done for him in the past. Well, she consoled herself, if worse came to worst, she could always leave Plains and find another job somewhere, regardless of how much she was beginning to love this isolated comer of northwestern Montana, or how much she enjoyed being able to be with Mom and Gram...and Dave.
    Her new stepfather was fast becoming one of her favorite people. And now, to add to the complications, had Mitch Carter become a factor as well in her desire to stay here? There was no denying the powerful at traction she sensed growing between them. In a burst of honesty, she admitted that the last thing she wanted at the moment was to pull up stakes and leave Plains.
    Which left her right ba ck at the beginning, meekly allowing herself to be bullied by her employer.
    It was almost a relief to be interrupted by Floyd, who was sticking his head around the door and screwing his florid features into a sympathetic grimace. “George Dolinger’s on the phone, roarin’ like a bull.” Floyd snickered at his own wit before adding, “George is always roarin’. He says his prize mare’s just been bred by